Composting will benefit both the environment and your wallet!  When you make compost, you create a source of high quality nutrition for your garden.

Did you know that composting can be not only easy but a great way to provide your soil with beneficial nutrients to help plant life thrive?  Composting is a process of taking everyday waste from your kitchen, or leaves and other natural matter and decomposing it to provide a rich fertilizer that you can use throughout the year, in your garden, on your lawn, and even for potted plants.

  • Compost systems range in size from small bins used to recycle a household’s scrap all the way to industrial sized bins for farmers.
  • Composting will benefit both the environment and your wallet!  When you make compost, you create a source of high quality nutrition for your garden and eliminate the need to constantly purchase a fertilizer.
  • Composting will improve the soil structure and moisture retention which can actually protect plants from certain diseases.

A good compost starts a home!  Begin your search for ingredients for your compost in your own backyard, kitchen and even your neighborhood.  What waste could you divert from the trash into your compost pile? Most of us can find a wealth of nutrient rich materials such as grass clippings, pine needles, cones, hay, manure, kitchen scraps, coffee grounds and dried leaves to turn into a soil nourishing compost.

Your goal to build a compost pile is to provide the best possible conditions for the proliferation of a hardworking micro-herd of organisms.  Begin your compost pile or bin with a compost starter.  This is done to introduce organisms to your pile. Composting piles or bins are quite simple actually, they need only a balanced diet, water, air and warmth.

Remember anything living can be composted, but the quality and quantity of the materials you use affects the process and determines the nutrient value of the finished compost.

The ideal Carbon/Nitrogen level ratio is 25-30 to 1.  You can achieve this by layering your compost.  Build your compost into alternating layers of high carbon materials like saw dust and high nitrogen materials like fresh grass clippings.

As with anything all living organisms need water, however; too much water will drive out air and will drown the pile.  Good, rich compost is about as damp as a moist sponge.  Make sure your compost pile is in a place that is well drained, you can achieve this by building the compost pile on a layer of sand.

Finished compost is one of the most versatile fertilizers you will ever use.  You can apply it freely at any time of the year without fear of buring plants or polluting water.  Compost can be used on vegetables, annuals, perennials, trees, shrubs and even in potting mixes for your house plants.  Composting is easy, beneficial to the environment and most importantly beneficial to your garden, lawn and all living plants!